“Communities in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia watched as huge crowds of local blacks gathered at railroad stations to await transportation to the Mississippi Delta, the Louisiana rice or sugar fields, or the turpentine camps of the piney woods. ” ‘At the depot an interesting spectacle presented itself in the huge mass of luggage piled […]

” ‘Here comes Uncle Sam!’ is what I used to hear on my mail route in west Durham. Mostly I heard this from older African Americans — along with the usual jokes about bills, junk mail and checks. Almost one-fifth of my customers received Social Security checks, and many of them relied on me to […]

The widely noted death of Frank Buckles made me wonder: Who was North Carolina’s last surviving veteran of World War I? Depending on how strictly you define “North Carolina’s” and “World War I,” he seems to have been either — David Samuel “Tex” Little, born in Catawba but moved to Texas after the war and […]

Tom Vincent, records management analyst at the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, is the latest historian to take on the task of tallying the state’s Civil War monuments (and the first to have compiled a searchable database). . Tom, how many “standing soldier” Confederate monuments have you recorded? Fifty-four, out of a total of 110 […]